


Implicit (as in Trust)

by guardian_chaos



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Drug Use, Episode: s05e04 The End, Friendship, Future Castiel, Future Dean Winchester, Gen, Supernatural AU: Croatoan/End'verse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-07
Updated: 2012-07-07
Packaged: 2017-11-09 12:06:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/455263
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/guardian_chaos/pseuds/guardian_chaos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The world is ending, and Castiel doesn’t look the same.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Implicit (as in Trust)

**Author's Note:**

> **Author's Note** : Definition of "implicit" is: "something that is implied or interpreted although not directly mentioned or expressed."

Castiel’s smile is terrifying, and Dean can’t stop looking at it. Castiel’s supposed to be stoic and unfun, not drugged and stupid and apparently facedown on the bad side of losing his mind. The grin is here, there and all over the place, and the man attached to it doesn’t seem any more with it than his smile does. When Castiel laughs, it’s a hoarse, gasping sound that grates out like sobbing. Dean feels the uncomfortable need to take hold of the angel’s shoulders and shove him back together. Instead, he clears his throat and waves a hand to indicate the world outside the beaded curtain trying so hard to hide anything that might actually exist beyond this filthy, pervy hippie pad.

“You coming with, or what?”

Castiel looks a little sick, the feeling teetering on the edge of that grin that won’t go away. “Fine, oh, great leader. Lead me.” When he walks forward, he almost careens into a wall. This time, Dean does grab him, but not quick enough to prevent Castiel from knocking over a vase of incense sticks. They clatter and roll across the floor, dry sounds scraping the hardwood.

Castiel neck lolls to look at the rolling vase, and the once-angel giggles. “Whoops.” Bloodshot eyes redirect themselves at Dean with a sheepish look. “Forget it. It’ll be there later.” He tumbles out of the room, releasing Dean’s hand from his shoulder when the distance between them becomes too great for Dean to keep hold of him.

Dean follows the angel outside. The air is harsh, buried in the scent of distant campfires and welded metal, smells of something broken and burning to ash. It’s midday, but clouds cover the sky in deep grays. A fat raindrop lands on the side of Dean’s face and crawls down his collar when he steps out from under the overhang of Castiel’s (home? escape? den of iniquity?) apparent place of residence. Ahead of him, Castiel spins in a circle, his eyes pointed skyward.

“Oh, look,” he says, his voice some dark approximation of wonder. A raindrop hits him in the forehead and slides down his face, right between an eye and the bridge of his nose. He smiles, slowly, nice and wide. “It’s gonna’ rain.” He shrugs, lowers his head and shuffles down the stairs of his porch. “Gonna’ have to put out the buckets, I guess.”

Dean doesn’t bother to analyze that, doesn’t really want to. He jogs down the steps and falls into place behind Castiel’s sagging, lurching walk. He feels the need to keep his hands ready in case the angel topples over, an instinct similar to those he’s had when walking up stairs behind frail old ladies. He doesn’t treasure seeing Castiel in the same light.

“Hey, uh, Cas?”

The angel laughs, again, and Dean really wants him to stop doing that. Castiel walks backwards, stumbling through weeds.

“That name,” the fallen angel mumbles, like the word is candy he wants to roll around on his tongue. “Cas. Why’d you ever give it to me? You gave Sam a name, too.” He turns back on his heel, almost falling over. Dean snags his arm before he does, but Castiel hardly seems aware. “You called him _Sammy_.”

Dean has the feeling of being mocked. “Cas, we can pick the flowers off memory lane later. You need to listen to me, ok? Just look at me for a sec.”

Dean can tell Castiel tries to, but the attempt fails. The angel’s eyelids slip shut and he looks peaceful, or at least he would if not for the way his footsteps falter and throw him up against Dean’s side. The angel leans there as they walk, feeling heavy even though Dean finds he’s a bag of bones underneath his baggy, ill-fitting clothes. Dean shifts his arm to wrap around Castiel’s waist, just beneath the jut of something sharp (ribs, Dean is horrified to realize) and Castiel sighs a little. Dean can’t tell if the sigh is relief, or bliss, or just the sound of someone’s hopes escaping.

“Ah, this,” the angel declares. “Camaraderie! Fellowship. _Brotherhood_.” The last word is said bitterly. “Just like the good old days.” He wiggles in an attempt to slip out of Dean’s grasp, but doesn’t put enough effort into the attempt to make it work, and Dean doesn’t let him go. Castiel’s face twists, and for a horrible second Dean thinks the angel is about to cry.

The moment passes, and Castiel turns his scary, blissed-out expression upwards to see Dean. “You wanted to say something, didn’t you? I did hear you say that.” The last sentence sounds like a question, as if Castiel is not sure. Dean’s chest clenches at the uncertainty in the angel’s expression, where there had once been so much confidence, so much self-assurance and purpose of being. This Castiel of the future is a dried out husk of who he used to be.

“Yeah, Cas,” Dean says, hoping to keep the angel’s attention for the minute he needs to get his message through. “We have to talk. Something’s not right here.”

“Oh really?” The angel buries his hand inside his jacket pocket, producing an orange pill bottle. “Even I coulda’ told you that.” He tries to twist open the bottle with one hand, his other hand holding onto Dean’s shoulder for support. The pills inside the bottle rattle as Castiel turns it around in his palm. When Castiel can’t open the bottle, a flicker of something raw and devastating roams across his face. He throws off the expression with a toothy grin and pockets the unopened bottle. “We are at the end of days, you know.”

“Yeah, I know that, Cas!” Dean can’t help but wonder if losing his temper is the wrong way to get through to the angel, if Castiel’s slack-jawed mouth and glazed eyes are anything to go by, but he’s already put in too much momentum to stop now. “I mean the _way_ everything is ending. This doesn’t seem odd to you? Zombies? And…” Dean tries to stop himself. He really does. He tries to bite off the last of the sentence, but it comes out anyway, “…and you. You’re like…this.”

It’s a crushing, horrible way to cut someone down, but Castiel just smiles that stupid smile and drags a little heavier against Dean’s side.

“Things…things change, Dean.” Castiel says this as though he is explaining the way of the world to a small child. “People—angels,” he corrects, “Well, they sometimes change, too. They become…less.”

It makes something in Dean’s chest ache to hear Castiel talking like this, like he doesn’t care that he can’t seem to find a way around anymore. Dean shifts his arm tighter around Castiel, almost so that he’s hugging the poor, washed out and totally wasted angel. Castiel’s fingers tighten on his shoulder with enough pressure to leave bruises, and then ease back to a slack, barely there presence.

“Dean,” Castiel says, and he sounds sad, “I’m sorry you have to see this.” For a moment, he sounds like himself, sounds like the angel with personal space issues and a tendency to tilt his head at every perplexing thing, sounds like the angel who gripped Dean tight and raised him from the fires of perdition. When the angel rolls his head into Dean’s shoulder and breathes hot air through Dean’s jacket, Dean knows that angel is gone, leaving what remains of his ghost behind. Cas’s breathy voice turns into a laugh that tapers out quickly. “But you see, I can’t seem to help myself anymore.”

The implications of that simple phrase seem far-reaching and horrible. Dean wraps the angel into an impossibly closer embrace, keeping Castiel glued to his side as they walk across the ratty old base this world’s freedom fighters have somehow managed to keep going, even here, in this dying, precious world. Castiel lets out a sound that Dean _knows_ is the start of a sob, but the angel sucks it back up and carries on with a lightness in his voice only drugs can create.

“How very difficult it is,” he says, smiling into the leather of Dean’s jacket, “to be so very, very…human.”

Dean glares out into the treeline surrounding the camp, that line between life and death by a virus that kills the essence of who you are before your body has even stopped walking. It’s the same virus, the same line between one reality and the other that apparently drove this timeline’s Dean insane.

Castiel’s breathing is raspy, little hints of a laugh at the end of each struggle to move, and Dean swears, no matter what he has to do to make it happen…it is not going to end like this. He is not going to turn into a monster. And Cas…the Cas of his own timeline…is never going to laugh like that, ever.

Castiel looks at him, just a little glimpse of chin turning upwards to try to read what Dean is thinking. He frowns, deeply, and strain outlines his eyes. There are glimpse of Castiel in there, little hints that aren’t nearly enough, and then he opens his mouth and says:

“I am still…happy…that you said no.”

To say that Dean is startled is an understatement, but years of training mean his body hardly reacts. Before he can respond—and who the hell knows what he’s going to say after Castiel might as well have just told him he is glad to be as messed up as he is right now—his own voice yells across the campground.

“Hey!” Dean’s future self stomps out from a dilapidated looking hut, his hands slamming against the porch railing so hard Dean thinks he hears wood cracking. “You think time’s gonna stop just so you can hold hands and make out?” He gestures into the hut, a fierce, solid jerk of his hand that commands all to obey. “Get your asses in here. We have plans to make.”

And just like that, a door slams and he’s back inside with a swish of blood-stained denim and leather shoes, leaving Castiel and Dean standing awkwardly in the overgrown grasses surrounding the hut. The occasional shimmer of rain dots the campground, and the air smells not fresh, but at least _fresher_ for it. It's the difference between having a rotten egg lying openly in a house, and covering the egg with a hat. Still better, just not for forever.

Castiel huffs, and pulls his arm away from Dean. He seems instantly sobered, and graces Dean with a soft smile that seems not-quite-right, but not quite as off as it had been before. Little speckles of of rain tremble against his face, not quite connecting to one another as there isn't enough of it yet for the drops to form together. His blue eyes match the graying of the sky behind him, and it looks like a storm is coming.

“Perhaps...” Castiel sticks his hands in his pockets and mounts the stairs to future Dean’s hut, “things could still be different." He closes his hand around the iron doorknob to Dean's hut. "Maybe next time.”

Dean huffs out a breath and takes the stairs two at a time to be next to Cas. “Long as I don’t end up like that cheese dick, I’m good with that.”

There’s that smile on Castiel’s face again, and it’s brief and fleeting and sets every one of Dean’s nerves on edge. Behind them both, the sky keeps darkening as Castiel swings open the door to enter future Dean’s hut, and the hush of rain makes the grass outside tremble. Dean's shoulders are damp, and so is Castiel's hair. There is no overhang outside of future Dean's hut to protect them from it, just the barest trace of the edges of the roof, and they are not enough.

“Well,” Castiel says, and it’s almost an afterthought when he throws over his shoulders, “I wish you all the best with that one.” To the inside of the hut, he grins even wider. “Hey, fearless leader!”

There’s a sigh of exasperation, and in the mildewy, candlelit dimness of the hut, future Dean tells Castiel to sit down and shut up.

Castiel gives Dean an apologetic smile, then goes to sit down. On the table before him is a knife, and he picks it up, places it on its tip, and starts spinning it around and around and around against the table's uneven surface. Both he and the other Dean look down at where the former angel slouches over the table, knife spinning so close to his face it is a miracle it is not hitting him, but Castiel only shrugs and keeps playing.

“You know what’s scary?” Castiel's voice is floaty, high in an unnatural way, and Dean can't help but ask what, even as the future version of himself rolls his eyes and flaps out a rather large, animal skin map.

"Don't ask him questions, Dean." Future Dean throws a glare at Castiel, one Castiel perks up enough just to send right back. "He'll only start babbling."

Castiel rolls his eyes, “Right, babbling. Another word for telling too much of the truth. What's scary, as I was saying, is how many times I’ve cut myself doing this, and yet I don’t ever really stop." He seems to be challenging Dean's future self, and when the two of them lock eyes, there is so much heat and promised pain in there. The angel smiles, bitterly. "Have you noticed I do that?”

Castiel's question is rhetorical, and it speaks to so much. No one wants to touch it.

"Whatever." Future Dean shoves Castiel and his knife back from the table to make room for the map he stretches over the worn, wooden surface. "It doesn't matter now anyway." The angel moves back automatically to make room, his eyes so suddenly and strangely content with all his despair that it hurts to look at him.

Future Dean starts outlining whatever new plan he has to stop Lucifer, but Dean's eyes are just on Castiel, whose pale gaze flits around the room like he can't quite believe where he is and is looking for someone to tell him he can be somewhere else. He reaches for the little orange bottle in his pocket and, now that he has free hands, he lifts it to the ceiling. Little droplets of moisture fall onto his knuckles, evidence of a leaking ceiling. Castiel watches them, fascinated, as they slide down the bottle and slip, slip, slip, all the way down his wrist, over the all-too-human pulse point and into the shadowed oblivion of his sleeve.

The corners of his lips slowly rise. Future Dean snatches the bottle away from him, and Castiel just laughs, like it's the funniest thing he's ever seen.

Dean watches, and swears, this is not the way either one of them is ever going to end up.

 

~4/27/11


End file.
